A2 AQA Geography: Plate Tectonics- Vulcanicity Case Study

Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland, 2010

Eyjafjallajokull is a volcano 1660m high in the south of Iceland 200km from the capital of Reykjavik.
Eyjafjallajökull is a small volcano (about 40km2) within the chain of volcanoes in the SE Rift Zone.
Situated on top of the Mid-Atlantic ridge and a constructive margin and a hot spot which makes eruptions more common.

On the Mid Atlantic ridge, the convection currents are driving apart the North American plate and the Eurasian Plate along a constructive plate boundary. This has created a chain of volcanoes along the SE Rift zone of Iceland, which runs from NE to SW across Iceland, even passing underneath some of the countries Ice caps.
Ice cap caused the lava to cool quicker creating larger silica particles
Melt water from the ice cap flowed back into the crater causing more violent eruptions

Fairly small eruption 2-4 VEI the impact was much greater than expected because of the ash cloud.

Social:

The people in rural areas ‘downwind’ of the volcano had to wear goggles and facemasks.
700 people had to be evacuated from the area around the volcano, and many of the roads surrounding the volcano were shut down.
Internationally: the winds redistributed the ash that was pumped high into the atmosphere over Northern and western Europe and stopped flights from taking off by clogging their engines. It interrupted not just European flights but also Trans-Atlantic flights.
During the main 8 day travel ban around 107,000 flights were cancelled accounting for 48% of total air traffic and roughly 10 million passengers.

Economic:

In total Europe lost $2.6 billion of GDP
This also has a knock on effect on International flights globally as they could not land or take off from Europe. This is thought to have cost Airlines and associated businesses were losing about £130 million a day (according to the IATA), whilst hundreds of thousands of people were stranded in other countries.
Hire car companies and other forms of transport increased their prices, people had paid thousands of pounds to hire a car to get them to Northern France to take a ferry.
LEDCs were also badly affected, with Kenya being a great example. 20% of the Kenyan economy is based on the export of vegetables and flowers to Europe. These are perishable goods and they are transported by plane to keep them fresh but the flight ban meant that products returned unsold and destroyed. Over 1 million flower stalks were unsold in the first two days and over 50,000 farmers were temporarily unemployed as their beans and peas could not be sold.

Environmental:

The ash contaminated local water supplies and farmers near the volcano were warned not to let their livestock drink from contaminated streams and water sources, as high concentrations of fluoride from the ash mixed with river water can have deadly effects, particularly in sheep.
The Eyjafjallajökull eruption put up to a maximum 30000 tonnes per day of CO2 into the air.

Responses were entirely DOMESTIC. The countries affected had the capacity to respond without aid. Their legal, technical and infrastructure systems could cope with the eruption, even if there are economic impacts.
More research has been done in to the effect of ash on airplane engines. It has been discovered that all flights don’t need to be grounded, planes are just required to fly at a lower height.